Cases
One case was a child who was admitted to a hospital with an extremely low weight. One nurse took over his care and he began to rapidly gain weight and his growth hormone levels increased during this time. The child was so dependent on the nurse emotionally that when she left, his levels returned to what they had been when he was admitted to the hospital, and once she returned, they stabilized once more.
When a police raid in 1987 released the children held by an Australian cult known as The Family, one twelve year old girl weighed under 20 kg (44 lbs) and was under 120 cm (4 ft) tall. She grew 11 cm (4 in) in the following year and her growth hormone levels returned to normal.
Writer J. M. Barrie has been speculated to have experienced PSS. His brother died when Barrie was six years old, and their mother – mourning the loss of her favorite child – neglected him for a time afterward. He was famously shorter than average (5 ft 3½ in. according to his 1934 passport), and his marriage was reportedly never consummated, prompting speculation that he was in some ways physically immature. He is most famous for his story of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.
Read more about this topic: Psychosocial Short Stature
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“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)